Thursday, September 20, 2012

LEIPZIG GEWANDHAUS ORCHESTRA

Messiaen and Mahler

It has been Deutschland Über Alles this week at the
Proms. Two evenings with the Berlin Phil and on Sunday (September 2) the
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (September 2). 'Gewand' = Cloth but this noble
band certainly has not got cloth ears. it is one of the world's great
orchestras and it played up its reputation in a programme of two whopping great
masterpieces: Messiaen's Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (1964) and
Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A minor (1904 – 6).

The Messiaen is scored for a large orchestra of woodwind,
brass and percussion (bells, gongs and tam-tams). There are five movements of
an awe-inspiring nature as befits the subject. The Albert Hall is a perfect venue.
Sometimes I wonder about the actual quality of the score but it is certainly a
quite extraordinary experience. It begins down in the dark regions, as if
Fafners are lurking. Five flutes then pierce the ear and one might think that
all hell is breaking loose but no, it is, of course, the resurrection – and a
graphic representation it is, prompting recollections of Stanley Spencer's
canvases and perhaps John Martin's too. The tam-tams – three of them – sound
and resound mightily, a shattering noise, especially when dying away; there is
nothing in music like it.

One curious quirk: Messiaen's score dwells very much on the
interval of an augmented fourth, that’s A downwards to D sharp. Now this
interval is known as the devil in music (diabolus in musica). So what is it
doing in a piece about resurrection?

Mahler too had a go, most successfully, at the Resurrection
in his Symphony No. 2 but of his purely orchestra symphonies surely No. 6
stands supreme, at first dubbed 'Tragic' by the composer, it spans more than an
hour and it spans, it would seem, life itself; or maybe Mahler's own life. The
work is a model of artful construction, only stepping the bounds once in the
half-hour magnificent finale with Mahler apparently predicting his own death
with what should have been three blows of fate, except that Mahler could not
bring himself to tempt fate and so he cut the third.

Part of Mahler's solution to the problem of the symphony is that
his music incorporates fragments of a popular nature (no vulgarity, mind you,
not popular in that sense) so that the ear has something to hang on in midst of
all the swirling, almost hysterical flights of fancy. There are passages of
ineffable beauty to be heard, for example in the brass quasi-chorales and the
arches of high violin sound in the finale.

This was a rousing performance with Riccardo Chailly in
total command of his Leipzigers and it was certainly the loudest performance of
the many I have heard. This is an orchestra to cherish.

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About Me

Six weeks in a bank was enough for him to decide to live by and with music. Selling records and writing about them for a high-class gramophone shop, working with London Philharmonic, Symphony and Royal Philharmonic, organising concerts for Myra Hess at the National Gallery and for Michael Tippett whose secretary-dogsbody and friend he was, concert manager for Beecham, music critic for The Scotsman, organiser of the Summer School of Music with William Glock at Bryanston and Dartington for 34 years, broadcaster on radio and TV for 40, during which time he interviewed some 500 of the most famous and interesting musicians, Hindemith to Bernstein, Cage to Swann, Stravinsky to Stockhausen.
He has narrated parts in Façade, Peter and the Wolf, Enoch Arden and Babar the Elephant. For his 70th birthday made a CD with friends Leslie Howard, Steve Race, Malcolm Arnold, Donald Swann, Jeffrey Tate and Ian Wallace. His books include an autobiography Amiscellany, an anthology Words about Music and My Life in Music 1945 – 2000, A Photographer at the Aldeburgh Festival (Nigel Luckhurst) and Musicians on Camera (Lelia Goehr).